What are they drinking in Armonk?

My colleague, Ben Pimentel e-mailed me the other day and said, “You gotta see this video.” I clicked on the enclosed link to find a tongue-in-cheek mini-documentary starring IBM vice president for sales Bob Hoey who made the skit to remind the company’s sales legions to promote the mainframe computer as the best bang for the buck in data processing.

But it’s the methodology that’s the message. At one point the camera focuses on this completely-serious Hoey — and then pans out into a large theater empty except for two lonely salespeople. It goes on to follow one of them as he zealously carries IBM’s message to carefully selected clients — by stopping passers-by in a setting that looks like a shopping mall.

Behind this bit of humor is a serious subcurrent that might interest those of us who’ve been following computing since the mid-1980s. That’s when the so-called client-server architecture — networks of PCs linked through a coordinating central machine — arose as an alternative to what was then-called glass house computing. The glass house was a reference to the mainframe that had to be kept inside a cooled environment, and was maintained by specialized programmers. They had the rap of behaving almost priests who made their corporate customers beg when they came to request some new software from the almighty mainframe. (Though not precisely aimed at the mainframe, the famous commercial that launched the Macintosh in 1984 evoked this dread of the centralized control of information from which the personal computer promised to free us.)

Fast foward that metaphor 20 years, and we now have data processing managers complaining that the power consumption of PCs has become problematic (I recently reported on how air-conditioning capacity is the limiting factor on new computer installations in Pixar’s processing center.) and network administrators are plagued by viruses, incompatible programs and all the stuff that we, as empowered users, want to stick on those personalized machines.

With this in the backdrop, IBM is re-positioning the mainframe as a back-to-the-future alternative. The tone of Hoey’s spoof training video is in keeping with the kinder, humbler image IBM now seeks to project. Click the bottom left triangular button to see for yourself.